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December 10, 2016 – Not Dead Yet. Well, here we are in Huatulco! The weather was forecast to turn crappy in Calgary, so we went one flight early to make sure we didn’t miss our connecting flight.  Sadly, that meant we had to fly out at 06:25, which meant we had to be there at […]

March 12, 2015 – Sa Pa So, we’re headed to Sa Pa for a couple of days. We’ll take the train to Lao Cai (yay, finally a train trip!), which is right on the Chinese border. It’s an eight-hour trip, and you have the option of an overnight sleeper or a day-trip. Then there is

March 8, 2015 – Ha Long Bay. The minibus trip to Haiphong Harbor was uneventful. It’s a commercial harbor, very busy as it services most of north Vietnam, but there isn’t a lot to see for tourists. But there is also a section reserved for tour boats, as Ha Long Bay is very popular. We’re

March 4, 2015 – Hanoi. Well, here we are in Hanoi, Vietnam’s second-largest city. It’s our jumping-off place for a boat tour of Ha Long Bay, which was made famous in a couple of James Bond movies for its dramatic landscapes, and for an overnight in Sa Pa, a beautiful town in the mountains near

March 3, 2015 – Hue. The bus ride from Da Nang to Hue is only two hours, and we averaged fifty kilometers per hour, which is pretty good for a major Vietnamese highway. Our perfectly acceptable hotel is half a kilometer from the south bank of the Perfume River, which runs through the middle of

February 24, 2015 – Hoi An #2 Our hotel is about a kilometer north of downtown, which is a pleasant walk in the morning if you manage to avoid being run over by the completely silent electric bicycles that are extremely popular right now. Small enough to avoid regulation, you don’t need a licence, registration,

February 12, 2015 – Hoi An #1 (Reminder: To see images full-size, right-click on the image and select ‘open image in new tab’.)

February 9, 2015 – Nha Trang and Da Nang (Reminder: To see images full-size, right-click on the image and select ‘open image in new tab’.)

February 10, 2015 – Da Lat Countryside We went on a tour of the countryside on the day after the Crazy House Expedition, and the first stop was a Weasel Coffee Factory, complete with coffee weasels.  Apparently, the weasel gets up in the morning, wanders over to its Coffee Dish, and eats as many coffee

February 5, 2015 – Da Lat In and Around Town The road to Da Lat was one of the worst roads for potholes I have ever been on, and it was so twisty and windy that many corners had 3-foot round mirrors on them. The driver honked his horn to warn traffic that the bus